Winter’s frozen fist punched through her windows and crawled over the bare boards where her cold feet stood during the day, and the cradle where her little angel slept, and the small bed where men lay on top of her. Her body only brought in so much, and less since the little angel. One rare client, instead of using her, asked something strange. A bag of warm money sang in his hand.
She accomplished the task as the client had requested–easy. A little trip to the Thames during the night. The client left it outside, and she dealt with it.
She sat on the banks for a few minutes, singing her little angel’s favorite lullaby. The frozen fist loosened around her and a little warmth slipped in.…
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“So who’s the father?” her mother asked, combing Paulette’s wet hair.
“We’re married, Mama.”
“But who is he?”
“If it matters Mama, he’s a good man, and he comes from a good family.”
“A college student?”
“An ex-college student.”
“And you said you’re married?”
“Yes, Mama. We had our own rites.”
“But this wasn’t a church, or a court wedding.”
She raised her eyes to the mirror, where she met her mother’s blank gaze.
“I’m not questioning the wedding itself, Paulie. You’re clearly in love with this boy. But you’re home, and I’m guessing he’s in the mountains, fighting. Do you really want to return to that, now that you’re going to have a baby?”
This was how their fights usually started: with her mother pretending to respect her.…
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He knew it all as soon as he heard the scream. She ran up from the barn, screaming, crying. He knew what it was, knew what he would have to do before she reached the house, knew even as she sprinted through the back door, kicked off her sandals, bypassed her Mama in the kitchen, and screamed, Daddy! Daddy! A snake at the barn! that he would have to kill it.
He sat shirtless in his armchair. It was Sunday. He worked mornings at Foster’s, came home for lunch, slept for an hour, and attended church in the evening. Unless, of course, his relief was late, or problems at home intervened. Either way, come six o’clock he’d be at the church; and for this reason, he regretted his daughter’s screaming in the living room.…
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Philip stared at his computer screen, at row on row of black words stretching across the white page, the first of eighty. Some Ph.D. in chemistry from Lexington wanted his paper edited so that it made sense. The company Phil worked for had six months’ worth of projects stacked up for him. They paid well.
Yet each morning he sat in his bathrobe at his desk and stared out the bedroom window at the cold Pacific breaking along the strand. He struggled to concentrate, felt like a clump of dune grass rooted in place but whipped by emotion. Susan and the past two years flooded his mind.
In the kitchen, his mother fixed his breakfast, father already off to work at the Pharmacy. Philip grabbed his coffee mug and shuffled toward the aroma of French toast and fresh-brewed Brazilian.…
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The worst heatwave on record arrived the summer I turned nine. It showed up on a Sunday morning, like a traveling evangelist preaching fire and brimstone. Even the air was angry. The sky bruised over in grey and green, but rain never came. My mother opened all the windows to try and catch a breeze, even the one in my bedroom, where the screen was torn and gaped open like the mouth of a jack-o-lantern. It didn’t help much. Carrie had already asked twice if we could turn down the A/C.
“It’s not working right now. My mom said she’s going to call someone tomorrow,” I smiled.
The lie was almost a reflex. Born of my knowledge that Carrie’s house shivered with artificial air in the summer.…
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So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power…?
—W.B. Yeats
On the last day of high school, I went into the alley to say goodbye to Big Al. It was late afternoon, lowering clouds, the sort of sky Mom had always called “the farmer’s friend.” Jimmy Collins—Jim, as he’d been insisting I call him since October, but I liked Jimmy, name and boy, because it contained “my Jim”—Jimmy had told me the word for that atmosphere: crepuscular. We gifted each other new words like treats. I’d said crepuscular sounded like an unseemly growth, it even has puss in it. Jimmy liked that but gently mocked, “Unseemly, eh?” and pretend-punched my shoulder.…
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“John’s at the prison today, working with the dogs.”
“Oh,” I said, looking up from the table at the motionless ceiling fan. “Okay.”
“Only two weeks til he’s done.”
“That’s great,” I said. “Wow, that’s great.”
Mom looked at me over the lip of her glass as she drained it. “It’s a promotion, Adam,” she said when she’d finished. The glass thudded dully on the coaster and she returned to her sewing. “It’s a promotion.”
“What?”
“Don’t do that,” she said. “It actually is great. It’s going to be great for him.”
“Isn’t that what I said?”
She didn’t answer and I watched her pale fingers work a needle through some fabric she’d stretched over a small hoop.
The phone rang from the living room and I pushed back in my chair, but she shook her head.…
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